New York, NY – In a Quake, Brooklyn Would Shake More Than Manhattan
By Brooklyn Eagle
New York, NY – The last big earthquake in the New York City area, centered in New York Harbor just south of Rockaway, took place in 1884 and registered 5.2 on the Richter Scale.Another earthquake of this size can be expected and could be quite damaging, says Dr. Won-Young Kim, senior research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
And Brooklyn, resting on sediment, would shake more than Manhattan, built on solid rock. “There would be more shaking and more damage,” Dr. Kim told the Brooklyn Eagle on Wednesday.
If an earthquake of a similar magnitude were to happen today near Brooklyn, “Many chimneys would topple. Poorly maintained buildings would fall down – some buildings are falling down now even without any shaking. People would not be hit by collapsing buildings, but they would be hit by falling debris. We need to get some of these buildings fixed,” he said.
But a 5.2 is “not comparable to Haiti,” he said. “That was huge.” Haiti’s devastating earthquake measured 7.0.
Brooklyn has a different environment than Haiti, and that makes all the difference, he said. Haiti is situated near tectonic plate.
“The Caribbean plate is moving to the east, while the North American plate is moving towards the west. They move about 20 mm – slightly less than an inch – every year.” The plates are sliding past each other, and the movement is not smooth, leading to jolts, he said.
While we don’t have the opportunity for a large jolt in Brooklyn, we do have small, frequent quakes of a magnitude of 2 or 3 on the Richter Scale. In 2001 alone the city experienced two quakes: one in January, measuring 2.4, and one in October, measuring 2.6. The October quake, occurring soon after Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, “caused a lot of panic,” Dr. Kim said.
“People ask me, ‘Should I get earthquake insurance?’ I tell them no, earthquake insurance is expensive. Instead, use that money to fix chimneys and other things. Rather than panicky preparations, use common sense to make things better.”
Secure bookcases to the wall and make sure hanging furniture does not fall down, Dr. Kim said. “If you have antique porcelains or dishes, make sure they’re safely stored. In California, everything is anchored to the ground.”
While a small earthquake in Brooklyn may cause panic, “In California, a quake of magnitude 2 is called a micro-quake,” he added.
Day: March 4, 2023
The Nations Will Continue to Trample Outside the Temple Walls: Revelation 11
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Israel killed two-state solution and Palestinians must accept it, says Mohammed Dahlan
The idea ‘is no longer feasible on the ground’, says former leader of the Fatah Party in Gaza
Mar 02, 2023
Palestinians must realise that the two-state solution “is no longer feasible on the ground” and is “basically dead”, according to Mohammed Dahlan, the former leader of the Fatah Party in Gaza.
“Israeli intransigence the measures taken by Israel over the past thirty years, especially with the expansion of settlements on the lands of the West Bank, as there are no longer contiguous lands on which a viable Palestinian state can be established,” Mr Dahlan, the exiled former leader of the Fatah Party in Gaza, told Sky News Arabia.
“The Israeli government has more or less killed the idea of a two-state solution. So we, the Palestinians, holding on to the idea of a two-state solution is like holding on to an illusion.”
Mr Dahlan said Israel is suffering from a threat from within its own government and that its current right-wing leadership is “declaring war” on the legal values on which the state was built on.
“The government is currently interfering in the affairs of the army, the judiciary and in all state institutions, which is what causes a continuing movement of rejection within Israeli society, which has become violently divided over these internal issues,” he said.
“But my responsibility towards the Palestinian people makes me demand that Palestinian officials stop pursuing the illusions of the two-state solution, after Israel has practically destroyed it.
“Therefore, we must not waste time and demand a one-state solution for two peoples with equal rights, and let Israel face its responsibilities as a government.”
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Israeli police on Wednesday night fired stun grenades and water cannons at demonstrators who blocked a Tel Aviv motorway. Protesters scuffled with police near the Israeli leader’s home as weeks of anti-government protests turned violent for the first time.
In the late-night incident, dozens of police were called in to extract Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wife from a salon besieged by protesters.
Thousands across the country staged a “national disruption day”, the latest in a string of mass protests against Mr Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul Israel’s judiciary and weaken the country’s Supreme Court.
Mr Netanyahu and his coalition partners, a collection of ultra-Orthodox and hard-line nationalist parties, said plan is needed to rein in the powers of unelected judges.
Critics say Mr Netanyahu, who is standing trial on corruption charges, holds a personal grudge against the justice system and is pushing the country towards autocracy.
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Mr Dahlan urged Palestine to unify the West Bank and Gaza under one Palestinian leadership and urgently hold presidential and parliamentary elections.
Mr Dahlan was once the Gaza security chief for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party.
“Without [elections] no development can take place in the political process,” he told Sky News Arabia.
Mr Dahlan said he does not intend to not run in any upcoming elections and does not aspire to any future political position.
Rival Palestinian factions signed an agreement in Algiers last October to try to resolve 15 years of discord by holding elections within a year.
The leaders of 14 factions, including the two main rivals, Fatah and Hamas, held two days of talks in the run-up to an Arab summit in Algiers, in November, following months of mediation by Algeria.
The deal is aimed at ending a rift between President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement and the Islamist group Hamas that has split Palestinian governance in the Gaza Strip from the West Bank and hindered Palestinian ambitions of statehood.
The Rising Nuclear Risk: Revelation 16
Nuclear threat on the rise: Russia, US control 90% of nuclear weapons
By Evi Kiorri | EURACTIV.com
Mar 1, 2023
This week on the Beyond the Byline podcast focuses on the growing danger posed by the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Iran has attracted particular attention as a recent UN investigation revealed that the country has high percentages of Uranium that could be used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
Additionally, in late February, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that his country would not hesitate to deploy nuclear weapons to gain an advantage in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. With these developments, it is clear that the threat posed by nuclear arms remains both significant and ongoing.
Which countries are racing to obtain more nuclear weapons, and what role might AI play in using nuclear weapons and the overall nuclear threat?
The Russian Horn’s New Nuclear Strategy: Daniel 7
Russia Unveils New Nuclear Strategy
By Brendan Cole On 3/2/23 at 8:44 AM EST
Moscow is developing a new military strategy in which nuclear weapons will be used to protect Russia against possible aggression from the United States, according to a Russian Ministry of Defense journal.
The article published in the magazine Voennaya Mysl (Military Thought) follows a series of incendiary remarks from Russian political figures about the prospect of Russia using nuclear weapons.
Guests and anchors on Russian state television have also boasted about Moscow’s nuclear capabilities and called for strikes on western countries backing Ukraine in the war against Russian aggression.
Adding to the discourse is the defense journal article, which said that the U.S. was concerned it was losing dominance over the world and so had prepared plans to strike Russia to neutralize it.
Part of the strategy involved the Pentagon trying to “defeat” up to 70 percent of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces “using a conventional instant global strike,” according to the article, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported.
Russian military experts are looking to counter what they say is U.S. aggression by operating Russia’s “strategic deterrence forces.”
Defeating the “American aggressor” would entail “modern strategic offensive and defensive, nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, taking into account the latest military technologies,” said the article written by a deputy commander of Russia’s strategic missile forces and a retired colonel.
This would show Washington it could not cripple Russia’s nuclear missile system and would not be able to fend off a retaliatory strike.
Newsweek reached out to the Russian defense ministry for comment.
Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putinannounced that Russia would suspend the New START treaty, the final remaining nuclear arms control agreement with the U.S., saying that he wants to re-evaluate what NATO allies have in their nuclear arsenal.
In reference to his invasion of Ukraine, Putin said that the West wanted “to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on us and try to get to our nuclear facilities at the same time.”
The New START treaty limited Russia and the U.S. to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheadsand 700 deployed missiles and bombers. It was signed in 2010 by former President Barack Obamaand his Russian counterpart at the time, Dmitry Medvedev.
Now as the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, Medvedev has ramped up nuclear threats in inflammatory posts on his Telegram social media channels.
In an op-ed for the newspaper Izvestia, he again took aim at the West’s support for Ukraine and that its continued supply of weapons to Kyiv would mean that “everyone loses.”
In a nod to what might follow a nuclear war, he wrote that “life that existed before” will be forgotten until “smoky debris ceases to emit radiation.”
The Risks of the Pakistani Nuclear Horn: Daniel 8
Brainstorming on repaying the debt by selling nuclear bombs in poor Pakistan. Repaying debt by selling nuclear bomb in poor Pakistan, IMF |
02/03/2023
The condition of Pakistan, which swore to make nuclear bombs even after eating grass, has now become almost the same. Nuclear power-rich Pakistan, which was begging for a loan from the IMF, has now found itself in a situation of living by eating grass.
Islamabad. The condition of Pakistan, which swore to make nuclear bombs even after eating grass, has now become almost the same. Nuclear power-rich Pakistan, which was begging for a loan from the IMF, has now found itself in a situation of living by eating grass. Pakistanis are expected not to drink tea, eat once and live without electricity. The ministers were asked to work without pay. This situation of Pakistan with the sixth largest nuclear power in the world is no less than an irony. But this irony of Pakistan has now become a matter of concern for the world as well. There is a fear that Pakistan may secretly deal with the security of its nuclear weapons.
Babylon the Great Prepares for War with Iran: Revelation 16
U.S. Navy F18s fly during Juniper Oak, a military exercise with Israeli armed forces, on Jan, 25, 2023. According to Israeli officials, the exercise was constructed to simulate a war with Iran. Photo: U.S. Air Force
PENTAGON DEVELOPED CONTINGENCY PLAN FOR WAR WITH IRAN
In January, the U.S. and Israel conducted the largest joint military exercise in history.
March 1 2023, 4:00 a.m.
THE U.S. MILITARY allocated spending for secret contingency operations pertaining to an Iran war plan, according to a classified Pentagon budget manual listing emergency and special programs reviewed by The Intercept.
The contingency plan, code-named “Support Sentry,” was funded in 2018 and 2019, according to the manual, which was produced for the 2019 fiscal year. It classifies Support Sentry as an Iran “CONPLAN,” or concept plan, a broad contingency plan for war which the Pentagon develops in anticipation of a potential crisis.
The existence of Support Sentry has not been previously reported. It is not clear from the document how much the Pentagon spent on the plan in those years. When asked about the program and whether it is still in place, Maj. John Moore, a spokesperson for U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, said, “As a matter of policy, we do not comment on numbered plans. Iran remains the leading source of instability in the region and is a threat to the United States and our partners. We are constantly monitoring threat streams in coordination with our regional partners and will not hesitate to defend U.S. national interests in the region.”
Support Sentry is one example of the U.S. military’s growing comfort with — and support for — Israel’s aggressive stance toward Iran. As U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides’ bluntly put it last week, “Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with [Iran] and we’ve got their back.”
As major U.S. attempts at diplomacy with Iran collapsed under Trump, the Pentagon quietly moved Israel into its Central Command area of responsibility, officially grouping it with the mainly Arab countries of the Middle East. The reshuffling, which occurred in the final days of the Trump administration and has remained under President Joe Biden, is the military corollary to the financial and diplomatic alliances laid out by the Abraham Accords, a normalization agreement negotiated by Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East envoy, Jared Kushner, between Arab Gulf states and Israel. The accords were touted as a peace deal, but in fact served to align these countries against a common enemy: Iran.
The U.S. and Israel have also collaborated on a growing number of military exercises in recent months that Israeli leaders say are designed to test potential attack plans with Iran.
Contingency plans such as Support Sentry provide “the general outline—the overarching ‘concept’—of a plan to take some major action against an enemy,” Dakota Wood, a senior research fellow for defense programs at the Heritage Foundation and retired U.S. military planner who served as a strategist for the Marine Corps’ Special Operations Command, told The Intercept in an email.
For instance, in June 1994, the Pentagon requested a CONPLAN for military operations in Haiti; by July, U.S. forces invaded and deposed Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The manual also notes that Support Sentry is a “COW,” or cost of war item.
Though conventional wisdom might be that the military has contingency plans for everything, CONPLANs are, in fact, quite limited since preparing them is time consuming, Wood explained. “Since staff, time, and resources are always limited, no military command at any level would develop CONPLANs … for every conceivable contingency.”
The existence of Support Sentry, then, suggests that the U.S. military takes the possibility seriously enough to prepare a strategic framework for it. CONPLANs also lead to consequences short of war, like military exercises.
“CONPLANs serve as the intellectual framework or context when developing military exercises because it makes sense for units that are honing their skills to have that work be relevant to likely tasks,” Wood said.
BY 2018, President Donald Trump had vocally withdrawn the U.S. from the Iran deal. In January 2019, he tweeted a picture of a poster displayed at a cabinet meeting and directed at Iran that read “sanctions are coming” — a reference to the “Game of Thrones” TV series.
Under Biden, U.S. policy toward the region remains much the same.
On January 16, 2021, just four days before Biden’s inauguration, Trump ordered the military to reassign Israel to CENTCOM, its Middle East combatant command. Historically, the U.S. military has rather counterintuitively kept Israel under its European Command, or EUCOM, in order to avoid tensions with Gulf Arab allies like Saudi Arabia. This was one of a volley of last-minute decisions by Trump designed to force the Biden administration to abandon diplomacy and adopt the framework of his “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran. “For decades, DOD placed Israel in the European Command (EUCOM) AOR due to significant tensions between Israel and its neighbors in the Middle East,” a Congressional Research Service report about the move observed, noting that “improved Israeli ties with some Arab states may allow more open coordination to counter Iran.”
Trump’s order followed a December 2020 bill introduced by several Republican senators, including Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to study the transfer of Israel to CENTCOM.
“Tasking CENTCOM to serve as the primary U.S. defense coordinator with Israel instead of EUCOM would acknowledge the new political reality of the Middle East under the Abraham Accords,” Cotton said in a press release. “Our bill requires a study of the potential transition, which could increase U.S.-Israel military cooperation with regional partners and help better secure the Middle East against threats like Iran.”
Under Biden, U.S.-Israel military cooperation rapidly expanded to encompass unprecedented joint naval exercises. By March 2021, the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet conducted its first-ever fuel replenishment of an Israeli naval ship. In April 2021, the U.S. fired warning shots at Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf — the first time this had happened in nearly four years. Then, in August 2021, the U.S. 5th Fleet and Israeli naval forces conducted an expansive four-day naval exercise.
Also in August, for the first time ever, the U.S., Iraq, and Kuwait participated in a joint naval patrol of the Persian Gulf.
“Any one of these steps may feel small, but in the aggregate, it’s a serious escalation,” Trita Parsi, the former president of the National Iranian American Council and now president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told The Intercept in a phone interview.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also remarked that “those exercises would have been unimaginable, unthinkable, just a few years ago.”
In January, the U.S. and Israel conducted their largest joint military exercise in history, called Juniper Oak. Six-thousand four hundred American and 1,500 Israeli troops participated in the training exercise, involving more than 140 aircraft, an aircraft carrier, and live fire exercises with over 180,000 pounds of live munitions.
Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder insisted that “it’s not intended to be focused on any one single adversary or threat; it’s all about working together,” but Israeli officials made clear that the exercise was constructed to simulate a war with Iran.
“The U.S. very much wants to signal to Iran that even if Washington doesn’t have an appetite for war, we’re willing to support Israel, which does.”
Notably, Juniper Oak involved exercises in which American aircraft provided mid-air refueling services to Israeli fighter aircraft — a key capability Israel lacks and without which its aircraft cannot reach Iranian targets — and drills involving American B-52 bombers dropping bunker-buster bombs on targets designed to resemble Iranian nuclear sites. Iran responded to these plans with its own military exercise, which Iranian military commander Maj. Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid said the country considers a “half war” and even a “war before war.”
“The U.S. very much wants to signal to Iran that even if Washington doesn’t have an appetite for war, we’re willing to support Israel, which does,” Parsi said.
While Americans oppose a nuclear Iran, voters strongly prefer a diplomatic solution over war, as illustrated in recent polling.
“Many in Washington may not feel alarmed by this because of their own conviction that Biden is loath to start a war over this issue,” said Parsi. “That may very well be true, but a very dangerous scenario is being created whose buffer against escalation is a president that may not be president in two years time.”
The reluctance by top defense officials to discuss the significance of Israel’s move to CENTCOM gives an idea of how politically fraught the matter is. “I’m not excited about getting into the subject you mentioned,” a retired four-star general who worked with Israel while at EUCOM, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, told The Intercept. “It is now water under the bridge.”
THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT is more candid than the U.S. about Iran being the focus of these exercises. “In recent months, we have achieved several important goals — the world has joined the fight against Iran,” said then-Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz in a Hebrew-language press release from June. “For this reason, over the past year, I have been promoting a broad plan with my colleagues from the Pentagon and the presidential administration to strengthen cooperation between Israel and the countries of the region under the auspices of the United States and CENTCOM.”
In June, the Israel Defense Forces announced the conclusion of a three-day strategic-operational meeting between CENTCOM and senior IDF officials.
“During the discussions, it was agreed that we are at a critical point in time that requires the acceleration of operational plans and cooperation against Iran and its terrorist proxies in the region,” IDF chief of general staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kohavi said.
As for actual armed conflict between the U.S. and Iran, that has crescendoed as well. “U.S. armed forces have reportedly struck Iran-related targets in Iraq (June 2021) and Syria (February 2021, June 2021, January 2022, and August 2022) in response to attacks by Iran-backed entities on U.S. forces,” a report by the Congressional Research Service states. “U.S. naval forces have interdicted or supported the interdiction of weapons shipments originating from Iran, including in December 2021 and February 2022.”
The White House, on the other hand, has declined to go into specifics. “Having Israel a part of CENTCOM has just really been, I think, a force multiplier for us, and allowing us to better integrate, organize, share information across the board here in the region has really been — I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” a senior administration official said in a background briefing. “But I won’t speak to any particular CENTCOM assessments or anything like that.”
The White House also hinted at the military option in its most recent National Security Strategy, the high-level planning document detailing nuclear threats and how to respond to them, which administrations release periodically: “We will pursue diplomacy to ensure that Iran can never acquire a nuclear weapon, while remaining postured and prepared to use other means should diplomacy fail.”
While the current administration still pays lip service to the Iran deal — which Biden promised to reinstate — it appears to be all but over. During a press briefing last month, State Department spokesperson Ned Price was asked if Juniper Oak meant that diplomacy with Iran was off the table. “No, it means that our security commitment to Israel is ironclad,” Price responded.
The president appeared to reveal the U.S.’s actual position in November, when asked by an attendee about the Iran deal while on the sidelines of a midterm election rally in Oceanside, California. “It is dead, but we are not gonna announce it,” Biden replied. “Long story.”
The attendee then told Biden that the Iranian regime doesn’t represent the people. “I know they don’t represent you,” Biden replied, “but they will have a nuclear weapon that they’ll represent.”
There is no evidence that the Iranian government is pursuing a nuclear weapon. “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one,” states the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, the Pentagon’s authoritative report on nuclear policy based on the best intelligence available to the U.S. government.
Should Iran acquire a nuclear weapon, it would certainly be seen as a provocation in the region, touching off a dangerous arms race. Saudi Arabia engaged in quiet negotiations with the Trump administration to develop what it insisted would be a peaceful civilian nuclear program, before Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman let it slip that the country would “follow suit as soon as possible” with an atomic bomb should Iran acquire one. By 2020, the United Arab Emirates became the first Arab nation to build a nuclear power plant, a key step toward building a weapon should it wish to do so.
From its brutal repression of protesters to the decision to provide Russia with drones for use in its illegal invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s policies likely played a role in the Biden administration’s political calculus around abandoning the deal. Biden’s Iran envoy, Robert Malley, cited both as reasons that the Iran deal had been dropped. (Israel, too, has a friendly relationship with Moscow and has vexed Washington by rejecting its request to aid Ukraine with anti-tank missiles.)
Malley, who had previously overseen diplomacy with Iran, last week led a delegation to Riyadh to discuss with Arab Gulf allies counterterrorism, maritime security, and, of course, Iran.
“Without the Iran deal, we’re back to deterrence; we want to show the Iranians that we have a credible military threat and that we’re willing to use it, thinking that this will deter the Iranians from the program,” Parsi said. “It can have that effect, but it can also have the effect of telling the Iranians that the U.S. wants conflict and make them think they need their own deterrence. The truth is that this type of deterrence absent diplomacy can be extremely unstable. It may actually cause the scenario that this strategy is designed to prevent.”
Three days after Juniper Oak concluded, on January 29 — just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived for an official visit in Israel — an Israeli drone bombed a military facility in Iran. U.S. officials scrambled to distance the U.S. from the attack, with the New York Times immediately publishing an article citing U.S. intelligence officials blaming the attack on Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad.
But with Israel now under CENTCOM, it’s increasingly likely that Iran won’t distinguish between the two parties, as the Jerusalem Post warned might happen when Trump first ordered the move.
“The plausible deniability for Israel’s alleged strikes … in the past has worked in CENTCOM’s favor,” the report observed.
Israel failing to prevent settler attacks outside the Temple Walls: Revelation 11
US State Department report says Israel failing to prevent settler attacks
US envoy for Palestinians visits town attacked by settlers day after release of 2021 Country Reports on Terrorism, which notes conviction of 1 assailant in 496 attacks
By JACOB MAGID 1 March 2023, 4:35 am
US Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr, left, speaks to residents as he inspects damaged Palestinian property during a visit to Huwara, on February 28, 2023. (JAAFAR ASHTIYEH / AFP)
WASHINGTON — The US released a report Monday that accused Israel of failing to prevent attacks by settlers in the West Bank.
The conclusion drawn in the Israel, West Bank and Gaza chapter of the State Department’s 2021 Country Reports on Terrorism was the latest expression of US frustration with Israel’s failure to crack down on settler violence following the deadly rampage that took place in Huwara on Sunday.
“Israeli security personnel often did not prevent settler attacks and rarely detained or charged perpetrators of settler violence,” the report stated.
It cited UN figures showing a total of 496 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians in 2021, including 370 attacks that resulted in property damage and 126 attacks that resulted in injuries — three of which were fatal.
Nonetheless, only one settler was convicted in all of 2021, receiving a 20-month sentence for hurling a stun grenade into a Palestinian home.
Settlers pray the evening service, as cars and homes they torched burn in the West Bank town of Huwara on February 26, 2023. (Screenshot: Twitter; used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)
The US report also highlighted alarm by rights groups and Palestinians who said settler attacks in 2021 “expanded in severity and scale,” with larger groups participating together in an indication that the “attacks were likely preplanned.”
The report did note that the previous Israeli government condemned such attacks and presented reforms for the police to implement in order to crack down on the issue, but it lamented the lack of success in doing so.
A report on 2022 will not be released until next February, but last year saw an even larger jump, with at least 840 incidents of Israeli violence against Palestinians documented by the IDF.
Despite the 2021 State Department report’s criticism of Israel’s handling of settler violence, it referred to Israel as a “committed counterterrorism partner.”
It highlighted the threats Israel faces from the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon; Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and lone-wolf assailants.
While 2021 saw the lowest number of deaths from terror attacks in a decade, Israel still endured thousands of rocket and mortar attacks, as well as car rammings, shootings and stabbings.
Cars burned by Jewish settlers during riots in Hawara, in the West Bank, near Nablus, February 27, 2023. (Erik Marmor/Flash90)
Hamas rockets killed 13 Israeli civilians though the US-funded Iron Dome missile defense system shot down the majority of the projectiles. Israeli retaliatory airstrikes and errant Hamas rockets killed 256 Palestinians, of whom 128 were civilians, according to UN figures cited in the report.
The West Bank saw 39 terror attacks in 2021 in which two Israelis were killed, according to National Security Ministry figures cited in the report.
The State Department also highlighted the stipends the Palestinian Authority pays to terrorists and the families of slain attackers.
The report noted the PA’s defense that these stipends are social payments for families who have lost their primary breadwinner, while noting the US and Israeli stance that they “incentivize and reward terrorism, particularly given the higher monthly payments the longer an individual remains imprisoned, which corresponds to more severe crimes.”
Hours after the report was published, US Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr paid a visit to Huwara, where a 37-year-old Palestinian was killed, four seriously wounded, and dozens of vehicles and buildings were torched in the Sunday night settler rampage that came hours after a terror shooting that took the lives of two Israelis brothers traveling through Huwara.
Amr “expressed his deepest condolences and condemned the unacceptable wide-scale, indiscriminate violence by settlers,” and is “extremely concerned by recent escalating violence in the West Bank,” his office said after the visit.
“We want to see full accountability and legal prosecution of those responsible for these heinous attacks and compensation for those who lost property or were otherwise affected,” the US Office of Palestinian Affairs added, reiterating the position expressed a day earlier by State Department Spokesman Ned Price, who condemned both the terror shooting and the subsequent settler violence.
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